Fast and Accurate Short-Term Load Forecasting with a Hybrid Model

Short-term electric load forecasting (STLF) plays a pivotal role in modern power system management, bolstering forecasting accuracy and efficiency. This enhancement assists power utilities in formulating robust operational strategies, consequently fostering economic and social advantages within the systems. Existing methods employed for STLF either exhibit poor forecasting performance or require longer computational time. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a hybrid learning approach comprising variational mode decomposition (VMD) and random vector functional link network (RVFL). The RVFL network, serving as a universal approximator, showcases remarkable accuracy and fast computation, owing to the randomly generated weights connecting input and hidden layers. Additionally, the direct links between hidden and output layers, combined with the availability of a closed-form solution for parameter computation, further contribute to its efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed VMD-RVFL was assessed using electric load datasets obtained from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing it with existing benchmark forecasting methods using two performance indices such as root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). As a result, our proposed method requires less computational time and yielded accurate and robust prediction performance when compared with existing methods.